(Radio Iowa) – After heavy rain, scattered snow, and widely varied temperatures during the past month, Iowa farmers are making up for lost time by getting a significant amount of planting done this week. Angie Rieck Hinz, a field agronomist with the Iowa State University Extension in north-central Iowa, says many producers in her region have struggled with weather conditions that were far from ideal.
“A lot of people really just got started about last Friday or so, just because it had been so wet,” Rieck Hinz says. “Mostly north of Highway 3, there’s probably a good percentage of stuff planted. You come a little further south, it’s a little bit less.” The U-S-D-A crop report that came out earlier this week showed soybean planting was at 27-percent, compared to 11-percent the week before, while corn plantings had bounded from 22 to 42-percent. Rieck Hinz is expecting more excellent numbers in the remainder of this week, as long as the weather holds.
“If we have a really good day in the state of Iowa, we can plant about 950,000 acres a day, so that’s pretty substantial,” she says. “Given how low that planting progress report was, I think we’re somewhere around maybe 40% of the corn planted. We can knock off some significant chunks of acres in a very short time.” Temperatures have been particularly uncooperative for planting, with 80-degrees one day and temps dropping below freezing the next day. Rieck Hinz is hoping things have stabilized for the time-being.
“Our soil temperatures are supposed to stay at around 50 degrees or so, and really that’s where we want them,” she says. “We want nice warm soil temperatures to help protect that seed. We don’t want overly cold soil temperatures. We don’t want an overly cold rain.”
Speaking of rain, she says growers in the Story City area got around seven inches of rain during April, which is well above average, and some areas got even more.
